Glimmers of Hope in the Aid Boondoggle

At a compound with a plasma TV and other luxuries, U.N. bureaucrats deny refugees market wages.

By

Sarah Chayes

Oct. 5, 2012 3:36 p.m. ET

In 2002, Tori Hogan was a 20-year-old intern for the international nonprofit Save the Children, helping write a report on the effect of humanitarian aid on children. In a dusty refugee-camp high school in Kenya a teenage student told her: "A lot of aid workers come and go, but nothing changes. If the aid projects were effective, we wouldn't still be living like this after all these years." That remark ended Tori Hogan's "dreams of 'saving Africa,' " she writes in "Beyond Good Intentions," a book that bypasses sweeping condemnations of the aid industry to reach sometimes less satisfying zones of nuance. While finding plenty to criticize, its young author discovers valuable efforts and perspectives worth airing—sometimes where she herself least expects them.

The narrative is framed around the author's search for the Kenyan boy who awoke her to the aid movement's shortcomings and prompted her shift from aspiring aid worker to aid critic. Predictably, the trek uncovers plenty of poorly executed aid. Ms. Hogan recoils at the big-screen plasma television enthroned in the lounge of the United Nations compound where she begins. She questions the argument that refugees should not be paid market wages for the work they do, since they receive free food and lodging at the refugee camp: "How can the UN officials defend that stance, when they are living in free housing themselves, eating free food every day, and having access to unlimited free water and electricity? To top it all off, they also receive a special bonus payment for working in a 'hardship' post, on top of their already high salaries." One of the most excruciating moments is Ms. Hogan's participation in a sanitary-napkin distribution for school girls, an endeavor she learns was scheduled because the aid group "had to fill in the blank space in the quarterly report due" to the United States Agency for International Development.

Beyond Good Intentions

By Tori Hogan Seal Press, 294 pages, $16

ENLARGE

Men waiting in line for food at a camp for refugees in Naivasha, Kenya.
Gary S Chapman

Ms. Hogan is hardly the first author to take a critical look at the international-aid industry. Bookstores today are crowded with such critiques. Some of the best work is academic. Groundbreaking research by Andrew Wilder, now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, for example, debunked a central tenet of the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan: that spending money on aid projects wins hearts and minds. Mr. Wilder found that the unsupervised glut of money dumped into southern Afghanistan tended to exacerbate, not reduce, conflict. The Carnegie Endowment's Milan Vaishnav has examined the shortcomings of U.S. civilian aid to Pakistan. Even the U.S. government has become increasingly candid about its own efforts, as quarterly accountings by the special inspectors general for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction attest.

The most savage writing on this topic comes from authors who have devoted chunks of their lives to conflict zones. In "The Crisis Caravan" (2010), Dutch journalist Linda Polman quotes, to devastating effect, Sierra Leone rebels who claim that they launched mass amputations in 1999 to compete with Congo and Kosovo for international attention and development aid. Michael Maren, the author of "Road to Hell" (2010), lost his child to the aid effort in Somalia. Ms. Hogan's illusions were shattered before she had invested too deeply in the aid movement, which may help explain her more balanced approach.

Not many aid workers or journalists make the effort Ms. Hogan does to experience life from the perspective of those they are helping or writing about. In one scene, the author joins Kenyan refugees waiting hours to run a brutalizing gantlet for their twice-monthly measures of soy, cornmeal, flour and oil. "All I can see is a mass of people," she recalls, "both men and women mixed together, crammed between two fences in a covered structure that . . . looks more appropriate for corralling livestock than distributing food rations." A sweaty, jostled, flour-dust-filled hour later, Ms. Hogan emerges with her Kenyan friend Fatima and a 20-pound sack of supplies.

Ms. Hogan shows compassionate respect for the perspectives of almost everyone she encounters, even an orphanage director who steals donated clothes and a family of HIV-positive "aid whores," as she puts it. "As I watch this little boy leaning against his mother's chest . . . it strikes me that none of the three people sitting in front of me are going to live for many more years. . . . A couple of chickens, some farming boots, and even a new house are all rather inconsequential in the long run." Ms. Hogan finds glimmers of hope, too, profiling a dedicated refugee high-school teacher, an angelic Doctors Without Borders physician, the dejected initiator of a novel—and effective—self-help methodology. Still, Ms. Hogan's suggestion that the best way to do good may be one person at a time rings a bit hollow after all these anecdotes.

The book's other chief weakness is its style. Ideally, a first-person narrator ought to be a kind of guide, leading the reader through complex material with a light touch. Too often, Ms. Hogan seems to think that she is the story, that we're reading this book to learn about her. In particular, intermittent chapters detailing the state of her love affair with a Dutchman named Mark detract from the book's value. Similarly, while the long segments of dialogue are effective in allowing others to speak for themselves (Ms. Hogan must have a tape recorder for a brain), they often dwindle into trivial exchanges that should have been edited out. On the whole, "Beyond Good Intentions" is a helpful contribution to the literature, but it suffers from Ms. Hogan's lack of years.

—Ms. Chayes is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Between 2002 and 2009, she founded and ran two nonprofit organizations in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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